advertisement
follow us
Newsletter signup
Get a little Crawdaddy! right in the inbox once a week:
Straight to Video
Rock Art Rock
The Decemberists
September 19, 2009
Terminal 5, New York, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "The Decemberists played a special one night 'lottery show,' where the songs played were picked at random by a master of ceremonies, played by John Wesley Harding..."
Ra Ra Riot
April 4, 2009
Webster Hall, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "This show was, at the time, the biggest one Ra Ra Riot had sold out as headliners, and it was clear to me after watching it that the band is destined for even bigger and better things..."
Florence and the Machine
October 28, 2009
Bowery Ballroom, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "Florence Welsh and her backing band delighted and mesmerized a sold-out crowd at Bowery in her first official NY headlining show..."
Dirty Projectors
July 19, 2009
Williamsburg Waterfront (Brooklyn, NY)
By Amanda Hatfield "I was skeptical about how well Dirty Projectors' gorgeous, complex vocal harmonies would carry over outdoors, standing under hot sunshine..."
See more in the Rock Art Rock gallery.
Most Read Articles
- The Smoke-Filled Room: Music and a Woman’s Right to Choose
- What Goes On: Liam Gallagher Reveals Post-Oasis Plans, and Other News
- My Life Is the Road: Clarence White and Jim Morrison Stretch on a 747
- It Shows, What Goes On: Live Show Review: Devo at the Regency Ballroom, San Francisco
- What Goes On: This Just In: Steven Tyler Is the Rainbow
- Reviews: Weezer: Raditude
- Introducing: His Name Is John Michael Rouchell
polls
Loading ...-
Search results for: kanye west
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Well, finally. After an entire summer spent twiddling my thumbs and waiting for some halfway decent shit to start happening, it finally has. Kanye, Taylor Swift, the Beatles, Jay-Z, Girls… Ellen DeGeneres! September has come and gone, people, but it was good to us while it was here. Let’s look back on it.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West Hates Taylor Swift or Whatever
For those of you still fighting the urge to fully give yourself over to the whims of the biggest stars from the world of popular music and culture, there were probably bigger news stories during September. But for the rest of us, there was no such thing. The moment Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift as she received the VMA for Best Female Video, we knew we were going to be in for an amazing week. First, the Twitter universe went crazy, and then it went a little crazier. By the next morning, all the major news outlets—and all the minor ones, too—chimed in, and that following night, Kanye appeared on the premiere of Jay Leno’s new 10pm talk show. Not a day later, the internet was overrun with “Imma let you finish” parodies, and that went on for a pretty long time. It was awesome, then less awesome, then not awesome at all. As for fallout from the incident, who knows? Kanye just cancelled an upcoming tour with Lady Gaga for no apparent reason, so something could definitely be going on there. And my mom thinks he’s a jerk now, so that can’t bode well for him either.
Tin Machine Dispenses Glitz and Bombast
Tin Machine
Tin Machine
(EMI America, 1989)
It’s easy to dismiss Tin Machine—the band and the debut album—as a David Bowie misstep, until you realize that no other major label release from the late ’80s sounds quite like it. Sure, Living Colour’s Vivid is loud and rockin’ and angry too, but it has melody and a production sheen that Tin Machine doesn’t. It’s fair to say Tin Machine didn’t want any of that stuff, anyway.
After the mega-successful Let’s Dance in 1983, Bowie released the diminishing-returns Tonight and the downright bad Never Let Me Down. Tin Machine was a democratic band and a way to ditch the Top 40 pop star thing that Bowie was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with.
Flight of the Conchords vs. Stephen Lynch
When one thinks of musical comedy, names like the Smothers Brothers, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and Cheech and Chong come to mind. However, the last couple of years have seen a revival of the genre. Comedians like Mike Birbiglia, Jon Lajoie, and Demetri Martin have all risen to fame largely by featuring music in their acts. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg has assured his place in the show’s pantheon with his humorous digital videos parodying the tropes of old-school R&B (“Dick in a Box”), hip-hop (“Lazy Sunday”), and European techno (“Jizz in My Pants”).
One of my favorite musical comedy acts is Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand duo who swept into the American consciousness on the strength of their eponymous HBO show, which began in 2007 and recently finished up its second season. My other favorite is New York singer/songwriter/actor/comedian Stephen Lynch, who has starred in the Broadway adaption of The Wedding Singer and whose latest CD, 3 Balloons, is hysterically funny. Don’t get me wrong, Flight of the Conchords’ music is funny too, but the two acts are extremely different.
At the risk of dating myself to mid-2008, I think they can best be compared using the terminology from Christian Lander’s “Stuff White People Like” blog, which chronicles the tastes of upper middle class, liberal arts-educated, NPR-listening Caucasians. In fact, item #77 on the blog is “Musical Comedy” and the entry features a picture of Flight of the Conchords. “If you find yourself at a corporate retreat where you have to put on a skit for the other employees in your office, it’s always a good idea to suggest doing a funny song,” the entry reads. “Do not worry about the music part, if you have more than two white males on your team, it is certain that one of them can play the guitar.” The post doesn’t mention Lynch, however, and I would posit that he, with his non-politically correct, borderline gauche stylings, would be preferred by the “wrong kind of white people,” in Lander’s terms—in other words, not NPR types. Unlike Flight of the Conchords, Lynch clearly isn’t worried about being seen as offensive.
Rock Art Rock: Issue 3.06c
Kanye West
Nokia Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
April 22, 2008
By Jimi Giannatti
Shooting a hip-hop artist such as Kanye may be the closest I’ll ever get to what it would have been like shooting a young Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. For me, it’s as much about capturing an artist’s persona as it is rendering their physical image. Getting a shot that depicts an icon’s onstage swagger and attitude—or a photo illustrating the special bond they have with their audience—can inform the viewer about a performance as much as a one showing them singing into a mic or playing an instrument.
Check out Jimi Giannatti at his photography page
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
For your sake, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you made the most of May. I hope you listened to the new Grizzly Bear record a lot. I hope you danced to the new Phoenix record while cleaning your apartment. I hope you watched American Idol with the type of dedication you haven’t had toward something since you were a teenager. And I hope you were school-girl excited the day the Wilco record leaked. Because you know what? Shit’s about to slow down to an absolute crawl. Summer’s upon us, and aside from some outdoor shows and some big summer tours, the music industry is gonna go into hibernation, and it’s gonna be lame. But for now, let’s take a look back at the month that was.
This Month’s Most Notable New Stories
American Idol Ends, I Get My Life Back
After five-and-a-half months of devoted, twice-weekly watching of American Idol, I am finally free to attempt regaining the massive chunk of my social life that I’d abandoned so that I could sit around trying to figure out how the American people go about picking their pop stars. The winner of season eight was, obviously, Kris Allen, the young, handsome, God-fearing, acoustic-guitar-toting, vaguely fratty, but still totally nice-seeming kid from Arkansas who will presumably go on to release a record that sounds a lot like Jason Mraz or early John Mayer or any number of other boring white people I don’t listen to.
Promiscuous Anglerfish: David Bowie vs. Kanye West
There are several ways we might go about demonstrating that hip-hop, not rock (or country, or old-time folk, or jazz, or blues, or chamber, or orchestral classical music, or opera, or musical theater, or mainstream radio pop, or whatever else you might name as a world unto itself), is the dominant form of today’s American popular music. We might demonstrate it via an example as significant as hip-hop’s lyrics, which speak for the nation the way rock used to. (There is a straight line leading from Buddy Holly’s “My love bigger than a Cadillac” to Biggie’s “Birthdays was the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirst-ay”—the desire for size, appreciation, and material goods, belted out in primal grammar. Revivalists like the Hold Steady approach arena legacy, but their songs are about that tradition, not part of it.) Or we might demonstrate it via an example as mundane as the fact that a twentysomething douchebag like Asher Roth feels most comfortable using rap, not backwards-baseball-cap-party-band music, as the vehicle for his frat-tastic boasts. But the way we will go about demonstrating this premise here is by noting how hip-hop now does what rock used to do: Namely, absorb all the lesser genres it comes in contact with, in much the same way a male anglerfish is absorbed into the bloodstream of the larger female with which it copulates.
There used to be rappers invited to drop by and lend some novelty to rock songs (KRS-One on “Radio Song”, remember?); now rappers have little guitarist catamites that they carry around like itsy bitsy dogs in sweaters (Lil Wayne with Kevin Rudolf, for instance). But I’m talking less about head-to-head dominance than relative gravitational force. In its origins as a collage of samples, hip-hop has an undeniable advantage here; still, note how we’ve gone from horn loops to undisguised lifts, like in Flo Rida’s frankensteined ’80s one-hit-wonder “Right Round.” But the clearest way to make this point is with an SAT-style analogy:
Rock : Hip-hop :: David Bowie : Kanye West.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Yo, is it me, or was March completely awesome? Over the past 31 days, I made insanely delicious steak sandwiches with chipotle mayo, discovered my new favorite coffee (which I now make every morning in my Keurig single-serve coffee maker—recommended!), listened to Cat Power’s “Colors and the Kids” over and over again for hours and somehow managed to be remain happy in spite of it, got a new pair of jeans, caught up on the new season of Big Love, discovered a new local bar that has $3 Budweiser every Thursday, AND I attended a Girl Scout Cookie tasting party where everyone had to rank eight different flavors in order from best to worst. Tell me about your month in the comments, please. Or, just read about all the stuff that happened in the music world, then get back to work or whatever.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
“Dark Was the Night” Concert Coming to Radio City
Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National took the reins on a compilation that was released in conjunction with the good people at AIDS awareness advocacy group the Red Hot Organization, and now they’re putting on an all-star show at Radio City Music Hall on May 3rd. The bill features Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, My Brightest Diamond, Feist, and a number of other artists who contributed tracks to the disc. Considering the kind of company the boys in the National tend to keep, you should expect an awful lot of top-tier special guests.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
I don’t like February very much. Where I live, it’s still ridiculously cold, and as much as I like the winter and the weather that comes with it, I think the truth is that I only like it because I associate it with Christmas and my birthday, two occasions for which people buy me things. But come February, those two occasions are long gone, and all I have is seriously dry skin and fantasies about drinking beer outside in the sun, which can’t realistically happen with any kind of consistency for another two months. If nothing else, though, at least there are the Grammys to help get me through the dark times. And news about the Barenaked Ladies.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Bonnaroo Lineup Announced
Well, it’s March now, which means you should be getting ready to spend the next five months of your life hearing people talk about summer music festivals. Who’s playing them, who went to them, who accidentally got dusted at them, and so on. It’s exhausting, but it’s a sad fact of my life, which I’m done trying to avoid. So, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to play along.
Your Handy Guide to the Year in Music
So, I’ve been doing this column for exactly a year now, which makes the angle for this Very Special Year-End installation a no-brainer: I’ve gone back and read everything I’ve written over the past 12 months and chosen my favorite stories—some serious, many just ridiculous—in hopes of taking a brief, telling snapshot of the year that was. Turns out it’s over 5,000 words long, so it’s not all that brief. Enjoy it, though, and for the love of Christ, feel free to share your favorite moments of 2008 in the comments. I’ll be back next year, but in the meantime, I’m going to drink Budweiser tall-boys and open presents. Hopefully, you’ll be doing the same.
January
R.E.M to Release New Album, Play SXSW
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t concern me much, since I can’t remember the last time I actually liked an R.E.M. record. (Not true, actually: When Monster came out, I was in the hospital with pneumonia, and my mother bought it for me and brought it to the hospital, along with a boom box and headphones, so that I might have something to do to pass the time. I loved that record.) Anyway, Stipe and the gang swear up and down that their new record, Accelerate, is a return-to-form, featuring the type of driving, up-tempo tracks that everyone fell in love with almost 25 years ago. Keep in mind, a band’s definition of “up-tempo” tends to change with age, so while I’m hopeful that it won’t be an adult contemporary snooze-fest, I remain healthily skeptical. Record’s out on April 1st, just a few weeks after their sure-to-be-packed show at Stubb’s during this year’s SXSW festival.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
by: Mike Conklin
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West and Lady Gaga Cancel “Fame Kills” Tour
Just a couple weeks after pulling his most idiotic stunt yet, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to point out that, actually, Beyoncé probably should have won the award, and losing a pretty substantial number of the fans he still had left, word came that Kanye West and Lady Gaga had cancelled the “Fame Kills” tour that was planned to run from November through January. No official reason was ever given, but it seems unlikely that it wasn’t a direct result of the VMAs incident. I even like to think Lady Gaga pulled the plug on it herself, out of fear that public association with Kanye would be detrimental to her career (it would), which has been exploding of late. This has nothing to do with anything, but you guys should really watch her performance from Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago. Shit was bananas, and it’s becoming impossible not to like her.
read more
by: Mike Conklin
published: November 2, 2009 in column: The Cheat Sheet
1 comment